A Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Who does not feel that Nansen's account of his search for the Pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretense of a few trifling acquisitions for science?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Quote Topics

Account Acquisitions Does Feel Few Gains His Ideal Loses Pole Pretense Rather Satisfaction Science Search Than Trifling

Quote Author

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
American - Judge
March 8, 1841 - March 6, 1935

Why are there organized beings? Why is there something rather than nothing? Here again, I fully understand a scientist who refuses to ask it. He is welcome to tell me that the question does not make sense. Scientifically speaking, it does not. Metaphysically speaking, however, it does. Science can account for many things in the world; it may some day account for all that which the world of phenomena actually is. But why anything at all is, or exists, science knows not, precisely because it cannot even ask the question.

Etienne Gilson

If the Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses effectiveness in this life. If the non-Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses much in this life, and everything and the next one. As Jesus put it, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"

Greg Koukl

A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions (...) if one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is consolation - indeed, deep satisfaction - to be gained from his observation when looking back over one's life. #Page no.134

Kazuo Ishiguro

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.

John Stuart Mill

Alas! the joys that fortune brings Are trifling, and decay, And those who prize the trifling things, More trifling still than they.

Oliver Goldsmith

He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.

Miguel de Cervantes

Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.

Erich Fromm

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary's. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.

Michael Bloomberg

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

David McCullough

Search is now more than a web destination and a few words plugged into a box. Search is a mode, a method of interaction with the physical and virtual worlds. What is Siri but search? What are apps like Yelp or Foursquare, but structured search machines? Search has become embedded into everything and has reached well beyond its web-based roots.

John Battelle

A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.

Richard M. Nixon

A man who loses his money gains, at the least, experience, and sometimes, something better.

George Bernard Shaw

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.